Unless you're a kitchen ninja that can plan and measure out the exact portions for every meal you make it's likely you find yourself wasting good food because you didn't plan right, you forgot about it, or you just had no idea what to do with it. Thankfully, it's not too difficult to cut down on your kitchen waste. Here's how to do it.

Whether you're cooking for 10 or for one, wasting food in the kitchen is easy no matter how strictly you plan everything. Of course, planning is the first and most important part, but if you're no good at that we've got tips for organizing your fridge and finding alternatives for food on its way out. Let's start with the ever-important plan.

Link All Your Meals Together On Your Grocery List

Chances are you're not the perfect household of eaters and you can't buy the exact portion of food you really need at the grocery store straight off the shelf. To solve for this you can plan on shoehorning all your meals together. Personally, I use a small flow chart that ties ingredients together, but you don't have to make it that complex.

First, you should be realistic. Do you always work late on Tuesday's and never cook? Then don't plan a meal for that deal. The second step is to tie your meals together. Buying a pound of ground beef for tacos but only really need half of that? Set another ground beef-based meal for the next day (or just have tacos, twice, because everyone loves tacos). The same goes for everything else on your list—pair everything together so you're eating it all in the course of a week, when you're done, you won't have a bunch of expensive leftover food scraps rotting away unused. Photo by Kelly Cree.

Organize Your Fridge and Draw Attention to What's Going Bad First

All the preparation in the world isn't going to save you from yourself and your forgetful ways. That's why it's a good idea to organize your refrigerator in a way that guarantees you'll remember to use the foods you need to. We've mentioned before that stocking your fridge like a grocery store is a handy way to keep the nearly expired items at the front of your attention. It's also a good way to remember to use those leftovers still sticking around after yesterday's meal. The other option is the Food triage box, which stuffs all those near-death foods in a tidy little box so you remember to use them right away.

Most of us have probably thrown out food due to spoilage, but regularly doing this is terribly…
Read more Read more

Find Clever Alternative Uses for Foods

Sometimes there's no simple way to work your meals together in a meaningful way and that means you need to get yourself ready for some experimentation. This means creating creative combos you might not have thought of before.

We've offered up a few great suggestions for this before when we talked about Iron Chefing your leftovers and those still certainly apply. You can also take the substitution approach. The New York Times highlights a few ideas for using scraps in meals including making potato peels as snacks, chopping up tomato scraps for risotto, and even salting and roasting watermelon seeds like pumpkin seeds. The idea is that you can experiment with all types of different pairings and uses. Creating meals from scraps and leftovers is a bit of an art, but it's one worth perfecting.